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By Neil IrwinThe Washington Post • Saturday December 29, 2012 5:06 AM

Editor’s note: This is the third of three articles from The Washington Post looking at how the economy should do much better in 2013.

In forecasting how the U.S. economy will perform in 2013, it is easy to look at the risks. Again and again in recent years, international surprises have had an outsized impact on the U.S. economy — the eurozone crisis, for example, and this year’s slowdown in Chinese growth.

Beyond America’s borders, there remains peril in all directions — though of a variety that is hard to measure and predict.

Europe is the economy that is forgotten but not gone. Financial markets have been surprisingly bullish on the eurozone since late summer, when the European Central Bank announced a potentially bottomless backstop to prevent the dissolution of the 17-nation euro-currency area.

That has led to a surprising sense of calm on global markets. Even when there are political or economic tremors — such as new worries over Catalan separatism in Spain in October or the return to the political scene of bombastic former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi earlier this month — it no longer results in huge sell-offs of the Spanish and Italian bonds and global stock markets. Even Greek bonds are on a bit of a bull run in the past few months, as investors start to think that nation has seen the worst of it and will stay in the eurozone and eventually claw its way out from the economic abyss.

Markets increasingly are betting that the eurozone crisis is solved. For the sake of the United States, we had best hope they are right.

Europe isn’t the only trouble spot on the world map. Egypt is in turmoil, Syria is in flames and the Middle East remains a seemingly perpetual tinderbox. If the unrest were to spread to some of the major oil-producing nations on the Arabian peninsula, or armed conflict to break out between Iran and Israel, it almost surely would drive the price of oil way up.

Then there is China. The world’s growth juggernaut decelerated this year, with growth in 2012 somewhere in the ballpark of 6 percent as opposed to the 10 to 12 percent that had become the new normal.

While for almost any other nation on earth that would be a gangbuster growth rate, the slowdown sparked worries that even a modest slowdown would expose structural weaknesses in the Chinese economy: The years of high investment and relatively low consumer spending, the political favoritism driving those investment projects, the discontent bubbling beneath the surface of an emerging middle class.

The good news is that none of that has brought China to the brink of crisis. Rather, it seems to be experiencing a routine economic slump without anything worse emerging. As a new government takes office and finds its footing, the best hope is that China can continue working through its longer-term problems with only a modest hit to short-term growth.

Finally, it is worth mentioning a nation that suddenly has become an interesting spot on the global economic tableau. Japan, the world’s third-largest economy, elected a new government last week that is pledging to undertake an aggressive Keynesian prescription for the nation’s longstanding economic ills, including new spending and pressure on the central bank to push more money into the economy and try to provoke more inflation. It will be a great test of the policy prescriptions offered by many on the left for the Western world.

If it works, Japan will finally reverse two decades of economic stagnation and low-level deflation and perhaps eventually even become a growth juggernaut, making up economic ground lost over the course of the last generation. If it fails, then Japan’s largest-in-the-world debt relative to GDP will come crashing down in a scary variety of the crisis. At Japan’s level of public debt, even a very slight rise in interest rates could leave its finances in precarious shape.

The first outcome would be generally good for the United States (though bad for American exporters that compete with Japanese companies). The second could be a catastrophe.